Spotlight of Attention
{22 minutes}
Spotlight of Attention
How Attention Works
I’d like to develop for you a very basic, yet also very useful framework to help you conceptualize the development of you attentional capacities. The image is of a spotlight. I would like to invite you to conceptualize your awareness as a spotlight. Often, without examining it much, we find ourselves identifying with the stream of our thoughts. What I would propose to you, if you examine this more deeply, is that what is really happening here is the accidental fusion of thought content, with the location of your awareness. When I say thought content, I’m simply referring to the stream of thoughts generated by placing your awareness into cognition. Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield says that our minds generate thoughts the way the salivary glands generate spit. Its just what the cognitive mind produces. The fusion happens when we are doing that, and we have our attention on it, and we think that is us. What I want to invite you to recognize is that your attention itself is like a spotlight, and that you can re-point that beam.
Many modern people are trained to focus attention through cognition. But if we examine it closely, we find that there are at least eight (8) different channels into which you can focus the spotlight of attention.
Five of them are sensory channels. You can attend to vision, hearing, taste, smell, or touch. All of them are, properly, ways of knowing. We can actively bring attention to vision. When we locate attention there, if we really focus this actively, in the present moment, our thought stream will often diminish, because we aren’t focused on it. We aren’t feeding it with the light of our attention. And vision itself is, on its own terms, a way of knowing the world. So too hearing, and smell. For dogs, in fact, smell is the primary way of knowing the world. When I take our dog Brix for a walk, he stops every ten feet, if I let him, to sniff something. My wife and I joke that he is checking his voicemail. A dog can smell, in the urine of another animal, its gender, age, what it had for dinner, its hormonal cycle. He is getting sensitive, nuanced, information from smell that is far beyond what I can detect. There is a whole world that opens to him through this sensory awareness. Bringing attention to and through the senses is what we call Coming to the Senses. These are all, we could say, external orientations of attention.
In addition, there are at least three internally-oriented channels of attention. Thinking, most of us know something about. There is also emotion, which, again, is something we can have a continuous moment-to-moment contact with. There is also sensation in the body. We call the hybrid of sensation, emotion, and memory the felt sense, and propose that localizing the spotlight of our awareness here gives rise to indigenous intelligence.
As with a spotlight, attention can be focused to a single point (we call this single point attention in mindfulness speak), or it can be diffuse (we call this non-interfering awareness). Our attention, importantly, has a shape. There is a visual practice on the website called Soften the Gaze which is about letting the visual field move from a single-point to a non-interfering awareness. The Japanese word boketto refers to a similar practice.
As you begin to become more familiar with your attention as a spotlight, you can begin to notice where your attention is typically drawn. I would propose to you that most of us have default channels in which our attention likes to ride. If we aren’t actively pointing it somewhere, there are neurological defaults for where it will hang out. These are shaped by our particular proclivities, interests, personality, trauma exposure, etc. We sometimes talk about these things as though they are fixed attributes, but all of us can train our attention into novel channels. If you hang out with musicians, you’ll find that many of them have attention on sound alot of the time. Did they become musicians because they were listening to sound? Or do they listen to sound because they’ve become musicians? Learning to play an instrument has the ancillary benefit of training us to put the spotlight of attention on sound, on training our listening. Dancers often have proprioceptive and touch awareness. So too do bodyworkers. Again– which came first? The interest or the attention? If you want to develop a channel, find a practice that will require that you use that particular channel. For me personally, learning bird language was a marvelous way to attend to listening. Learning bird language has made me more musical. Is it because birds have perfect pitch? Probably not, although they might. It’s because I’m paying more attention to sound, which, in and of itself, improves my listening.
Like all of our work in Restorative Practices, what we’re trying to do is getting all of your potentials back on the menu. So if you have a particular channel of attention that is hard for you to connect with, or stabilize attention in, engage a practice that trains that particular sense. You can use the filtering tools to help you find practices, but find a partial list in related practices.
Related Practices:
To train vision: Stare Vacantly into the Distance, Soften the Gaze. To train hearing: Owl Ears, Bird Language. To train smell: Inhale, and Savor Delicious Aromas. To train taste: Bake. To train touch: Grounding, Use Your Hands. With respect to training internal channels, train emotion through: Emotional Yoga. Train sensation through: Polyvagally-informed mindfulness practice, Interoception.Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.